You cannot expect a foreign country to be more Catholic than the pope for you.

Monarchies are above political parties. Sometimes political parties do things that are to the disadvantage of the country because they want to beat the other party. In Iran, where we have different religions and ethnic groups, it was a unifying factor.

I believe in freedom for women to have equal rights - the right to work, the right to hold high positions, the right to take custody of their children after divorcing.

Iranian women are very courageous and active, even with all the oppression.

You have to judge everybody on balance, all the positives and all the negatives. In the life of my husband, I think the positives outweigh the negatives.

In Iran, as in all developing countries, they wanted to copy the outside world, without knowing what was good for our own country.

I was never interested in money. I always looked down on it. But now that I have less money, I see that without money, you cannot do much. Everything in the end is about money.